The fact that the eagles were so close to the trail this afternoon makes me want to figure out how to carry a camera with me. I'm bound to see these eagles again. I do have a light weight pocket camera with a telephoto lens that collapses into the camera body when the camera is off. It's not an ideal solution, but it would be a lot better than a phone with no telephoto lens at all. Today's picture is probably the worst that I have ever uploaded to the blog. Hey, maybe it will inspire me to do better.
It was bitterly cold this morning and didn't really warm up much throughout the day. We waited until later to take Dawn on her morning walk, but the wait didn't help much. It was still 25 degrees. I didn't attempt my long walk until after lunch in hopes that things would warm up. Nope. The temperature never got above freezing. The wind wasn't terrible today, but there was enough of a wind chill to make me feel like an arctic explorer again. I didn't get 20,000 steps today, but who's counting. At least my feet didn't hurt much today. It was a pretty good walk and I did see the eagles.
I made some progress with the star tracker this morning. While I was waiting for the temperature to warm up, I upgraded the app on my phone and downloaded the new firmware to the Polaris tracker. The two upgrades made some things better and other things worse. This is still a work in progress. For the first time I was able to calibrate the unit accurately so that when I asked it to go to a star or planet, it was at least pointing in the general direction. The tracking seems to work smoothly now. It's hard to tell how accurate the tracking is since I'm doing all this during the day inside my office. I have Stellarium on my computer and I use this powerful planetarium software to confirm that the Polaris is pointing in the right direction. The tracker actually seems to work as promised. At least it works for a while. Inevitably the Polaris will crash if I use it long enough. Once it starts crashing, I have trouble getting it to work again. As I said, this is still a work in progress.
I'm really glad the gas company was able to get the leak fixed yesterday. It would have been dangerously cold last night without the furnace running. This cold weather makes me wonder if we're going to have another power generation fiasco like we did last winter. There has been a lot of talk, but I don't think the state has actually done much to ensure that an extended freeze won't curtail natural gas deliveries to power plants again. Last winter was a huge mess and some people were without power for days.
It was very cold when I took the trash out to the curb this evening. The freezing weather made me think of one of my favorite stories from childhood. If you've never read "A Pail of Air" by Fritz Lieber you ought to look it up. The story was published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in December 1951 and I still remember it after all these years. It is a young boy's recollection of living on a world that was pulled out of the solar system by a passing dark star and is now lost in deep space with a frozen atmosphere and a small handful of people who survive by melting the frozen oxygen over a constantly burning fire in a small room insulated by many layers of blankets. Not sure how plausible this scenario is, but it made an impression on me.
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